Cerebral Hack

Again I cant thank enough my bud @EdRabbit and his friend @VioletBlue who are in the San Francisco area for giving me a hand at Interviewing and Demoing at Neurosky HQ Located in San Jose, CA. with me being in Chicago (and in this economy) they opted to do the foot work for me, much thanks, you two did a great job!

HOW DOES THE MINDSET WORK?

“A couple of keys for us,” Jim Sullivan, VP Worldwide Sales begins to explain “in that in some of the products we see today you can tell they took traditional medical technology and repurposed it. They cleaned it up and pulled away the pieces you don’t need. We took the opposite approach. We started with the individual – and that presented some challenges – and created the product from the ground up with them in mind. The brain is a wonderful computer, but it’s an analog computer. People in the digital age are used to digital responses. A digital response is immediate and definite, it’s either a 1 or a 0, its on or off. Analog is not that way at all. Our chip converts the signals from analog to digital”.

“Now [the Mindset] can remove the measurement of muscle movement, it’s listening to brainwaves, the faintest signal in the human body. Your heartbeat can be picked up very easily, it’s a very strong electrical signal. Brainwaves are measured in microvolt’s. Anytime you’re listening to brainwaves, because they are so faint, you have to listen really, really hard. So for us it was a challenge to get rid of the muscle noise and just focus on brainwaves. When you look at something like the NIA that uses muscles for control, most of that noise you see in the brainwave, we worked hard to filter out. So it’s simply a different approach. We take that [muscle noise] out of the equation”

“The two algorithms we ship in this chip are Attention and Mediation, that’s what we call them. You can call them any number of things. Attention; by the way in Neuroscience, has 42 very different definitions, and meditation also has a very large amount. Attention in our case is really a single minded focus, blocking everything but one thing out in your mind. So you can drive the attention meter on our Brainwave Visualizer application  very high by staring at something and concentrating on moving the dial. Meditation is not the opposite of attention, it’s like a venn diagram; you can be very attentive, and very serene at the same time. The MindSet does also provide the raw EEG wave – but that is primarily used more by researchers than developers at the moment.”

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Firstly I want to thank my bud @EdRabbit and his friend @VioletBlue who are in the San Francisco area for giving me a hand at Interviewing and Demoing at OCZ HQ.  Located in San Jose, CA. with me being in Chicago (and in this economy) they opted to do the foot work for me, much thanks, you two did a stellar job!  I hope you two had a lot of fun :)

For more information on the OCZ NIA you can read ther review we did for the device HERE. For some custom mods that have been done by its development community and can find the links to various Applications HERE. And you can join in the discutions within its community HERE

Listening to the audio interview, and then myself having a talk with Dr. Michael Schuette on the phone, Ive come to gain a lot of respect for OCZ and where they have gone with the NIA, their philosophies on BCI and business within its market in general.  For those that don’t know, OCZ is a manufacturer of High Performance RAM for anything from “1337 gaming rigs” to professional engineering machines that run ProE and SolidWorks at the same time.  A lot of people down talk it because it doesn’t do what they expect it to.  When in fact it does more than what they let on, and have plans in the future to do even more.  Dr. Schuette even says:
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Looks like all their efforts are being focused on more important matters.  Gotta respect a company that is that concerned with Quality Assurance of their product.  I look forward to speaking with them soon.

Dear Steven,

Tansy Brook at NeuroSky has just emailed me to let me know their SDK for the NeuroSky MindSet has been made Free and to the Public.

This means that anyone can now develop software for this fantastic BCI device.  And if the NeuroSky user community is anywhere near as enthusiastic about developing and hacking the MindSet as I have seen otehrs do for the OCZ NIA we have some great things on the horizon.

Stay Tuned.

Sometimes we all have to take a step back and take notice to the advancements in technology; and the aspects in place, as to why we are as far as we are when it comes to the technology we have grown accustomed to. Without medical advancements in Neurology and our now very (yet still limited) extensive knowledge of the brain, this site and others like it would not exist.

This is the story of Jennifer Bechard of Michigan about her fight against Hydrocephalus and what YOU can do to help.  She has agreed to share her tale  for CerebralHack.com in hopes that more people will take notice of this illness that affects so many and educate those that may not be familiar with Hydrocephalus.

What is Hydrocephalus? How does it feel to have a headache all day, everyday? Never experiencing a moment without any form of relief? Although hydrocephalus is not the typical household word, it is not uncommon. Hydrocephalus, commonly referred to as “water on the brain”, is a lifelong chronic neurological condition, characterized by an increased volume of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) within the spaces inside the brain. Hydrocephalus affects over one million Americans from newborns to seniors and presently, there is no cure…. (continue reading…)

OCZ NIA IP owners Brainfingers have announced their New training Software for the NIA and hints at their Beta SDK Release!

“We have completed a beta SDK that we will be releasing. Before we release the SDK we need to release new nia software as it will become the basis for the SDK.

www.brainfingers.com/downloadNiaSoftware.htm

The new software includes an updated Pong Game. The game can be controlled by any of the 8 brainfingers. I have also added a new dynamic following functionality to the calibration process. It is called Auto-Balance. I am hoping it will improve performance of the alpha and beta brainfinger controllers. Auto-Balance involves performing a calibration as in previous nia software, but once the calibration is performed the software then dynamically but slowly follows the calibrated balance point of each brainfinger.

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Rejoice! it seems as if the rumors were thankfully untrue about Emotiv going under. They have recently announce the release of their SDK Package with SDK headset for a nominal fee of $500. In an email I received a few days ago.

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